Could You Look Down from 24 Miles Up and Jump? Felix Baumgartner Just Did

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DID YOU WATCH! Did your heart pound, your palms get sweaty, your muscles tense! Did you join the millions around the world gripped by fear and tension as Felix Baumgartner rose to more than 24 miles in a balloon-lifted capsule, opened the door (OH MY GOD!) stood out on the bar outside with a camera over his head looking down (OH MY GOD!!!!!),…AND JUMPED!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAIIIGGH!

What a thrill! For Felix, sure, but for US too…sitting safely on the ground in our kitchens or living room or offices or wherever, glued to a TV or computer screen, riveted by and connected to one of the most gripping fears humans experience, the fear of heights, as no human has ever experienced it, viscerally feeling the fear even as we sat safely, firmly on terra-thankfully-very-firma, watching. What a FANTASTIC demonstration of the animal wiring of the human brain when it comes to fear.

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When you ask people what scares them the most, fear of heights ranks high on the list. Endangering people by putting them at great heights is a common tool for evoking fear in movies and TV shows like Fear Factor. The toughest challenges in those personal development ‘ropes courses’ are always the ones where you have to climb up a tree or tower (wearing a harness, but that doesn’t matter) and jump off. Fear of heights makes tons of money, from bungee jumping, to that glass-floored walkway out over the Grand Canyon, to the millions that people are willing to pay to go to the top of the tall buildings of the world for A) the view and B) the scariness of being up that high. The CN tower in Toronto will charge you $175 for the EDGE WALK thrill of edging out to the edge of the tower (!!!) and, tethered to a rail over your head, hanging your bottom backwards out OVER THE EDGE OF THE BUILDING!!! (No extra charge for looking down. It’s unclear if there’s a charge if you lose your lunch. Tip if you’re in Toronto. Even if it’s not raining, take an umbrella if you walk under the CN Tower.)

As common as acrophobia is, then, it’s small wonder that tens, probably hundreds of millions of people just watched Felix Baumgartner to do what would scare the living BEJEEZUS out of most of us…jumping out of an ascent capsule at 128,000 feet/24.25 miles/39,014meters…(not literally the edge of space, far from it, but media likes to take that freedom with the facts). The event was watched live on You Tube by 8 million people, almost 20 times more than had ever watched anything live on that global village before. I was one of them. Notes during the final moments;

MC; “Okay we’re getting serious now Felix.” !!! Sound from the capsule of pressurizing his suit! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!???? (Wide shot of balloon from the ground. Looks like it’s going to burst. AAIIGH! Heart pounds harder!)

MC ”From now on…our Guardian Angel will take care of you…!” The global supply of human stress hormones is at an all time high.

MC: “Release seat belt.” HOLY CRAP!!!!! Breathing noises from Baumgartner’s microphone….breathing fast!!! Wish there was telemetry on his vital signs. WHAT IS GOING ON IN HIS BRAIN!? He’s got to be one stressed animal!

What was all that emotion about? Those twitter comments, by the way, came from bright, educated, science journalists who, like me and the immense global community that was joined together in this common intense experience, felt fear in precisely the same way. The amygdala, an area of the brain down near the brain stem that triggers the ‘Fight or Flight”/fear response, knew there was danger in what we were watching, if not to us then to a fellow member of the human tribe, and HIS experience became ours. The amygdala triggered the release of glucocorticoids and other stress hormones that made our hearts race and our palms get sweaty. It turned down our immune systems, reduced production of sperm and bone cells, and literally increased the urge to void our waste; (Twitter comment:“I may pee my pants just watching!”) These are all part of the autonomic response to any signal of potential danger, and you could literally watch these responses happening as people commented on what they were feeling as they watched.

We weren’t in danger, of course, so it shouldn’t have been scary to us rational beings, right? Nope. That’s not how risk perception works. The way we perceive and respond to risk is a combination of the facts of the situation (We’re on the ground. We’re safe” and the feelings (WE ARE WATCHING A FELLOW HUMAN JUMP OUT OF SOMETHING 24+ MILES HIGH!) As is almost always the case with risk perception, the feelings win. Thank you, Felix, for reinforcing the lesson that we are hardly as smart/rational/cognitively in charge powerful as we’d like to think we are. Reason takes a back BACK seat at times like these.

What a thrill it was to watch. How compellingly real it became for all of us, who are not members of Baumgartner’s family or circle of friends, when the camera showed the faces of Baumgartner’s mother and family, tense at first, raising our tension, then crying with relief, evoking our shared tears. That offers yet another important piece of evidence from this fabulous demonstration of risk perception…confirming that a risk is far more compelling/scarier when it is personified, than is a risk we experience only as an idea or a bunch of facts and figures (e.g. climate change). How terrifying it was to watch him tumbling out of control while falling at hundreds of miles an hour…reinforcing the finding from risk perception research that any risk evokes more fear the less control we feel we have.

When we catch our breath there will be many more lessons from this exciting human adventure. One of them certainly is how we are all connected, social human animals, by the neural architecture and chemistry…and emotional nature…of risk perception.

Image: Screenshot from the livestream of Baumgarter, just before the jump, from Universe Today.

About the Author: David Ropeik is an Instructor at the Harvard Extension School and author of 'How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts'. Follow on Twitter @dropeik.

5 Comments

NOTE: I edited this piece. Yes, I know, a tweet of mine was used in it. Not sure if this requires a “conflict of interest” note. I am fine either way.

Initially, in service of speed (while the story was still very ‘hot’), the article did not contain links to tweets. This takes time to find and insert. After consulting with people on Twitter, I decided to insert links to tweets to ensure transparency.

I could also have used Storify to embed tweets. Storify is fantastic to draw attention to tweets. This should be used when the key information resides in tweets. In this case, key information is elsewhere and tweets are mainly illustrative. I want readers’ attention to be drawn away from tweets, not to them. In this case, Storify would have been counter-productive.

I could step out and look down without really very much trouble. If I looked up at the balloon, my head would start to spin. I don’t know what it is like for other people, but I only have a problem if I look up, but then it is real bad. I ca be on solid ground and look up at a tall building and get vertigo.

This may not be printed for questioning what everyone seems required to believe, but the holes in this story are massive.
Including the fact that, for example, vibration effects due to reaching the sound barrier are well known and would have caused damage to Baumgartner’s equipment.
Or that no sonic boom seems to have been reported. They try to “explain it away” by saying it took place in the stratosphere, but Baumgartner was still traveling at above the speed of sound when he reached the troposphere.
And it’s questionable if simple air friction, especially in an area as supposedly thin as the stratosphere, would slow Baumgartner enough in the time of the “skydive” to deply a parachute.
Note, too, that Baumgartner reportedly had a camera mounted on the front of his suit. There may be some question as to the availability of this film, but, in any provided anywhere now, you don’t see more than the first about 104 seconds. Out of a skydive time of about 550 seconds, only about a fifth seem available. Even though it’s claimed Baumgartner exceeded the speed of sound, therre are no signs of vibration effects on the camera taking the pictures. Also, breaking the sound barrier usually affects the area around the individual, such things as sudden condenation of water into disks around who breaks the sound barrier. None of this was visible on the film, either.

julianpenrod is back! And now he’s saying that Baumgartner’s jump was a hoax, in addition to the moon landings, evolution, global warming, and science in general. He really needs to double-check his meds.